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One Artist’s Beautiful Visualizations of a Dark History

The artist Theaster Gates at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, with some of the work included in “But to Be a Poor Race,” his new show there.Credit
Laure Joliet

History is a perpetually accumulating thing — an archive of objects and statistics in constant growth. At Theaster Gates’s “But to Be a Poor Race,” his inaugural show at Regen Projects, historical facts and figures are reincarnated as works of art. The vivid paintings lining the Los Angeles gallery’s walls are visualizations of data gathered by the late black scholar and activist W.E.B. DuBois: the numbers of black people in post-Emancipation Georgia who owned land, who were once slaves, who had kitchen appliances and professional degrees and other markers of class. These figures have been beautifully abstracted into semblances of pie charts, swirling line graphs and color blocks. Elsewhere, the fraying, red-and-gray gradations of a wall-mounted tapestry are the flattened lengths of a fire hose, the principal weapon used against black civil rights activists in the 1960s. And poetry is embossed in gold capital letters on the spines of black-bound Jet magazines, lined up at eye-level on the gallery walls in tidy rows:

NOT ONLY PENTATONICBLACK HARMONICSGALLOWEDCLAY BODYDARK AND LOVELYFABULAXER

“Yes! Fabulaxer!” Gates enthuses, casually reclining on the polished cement of the gallery floor. “Look how beautiful this language is even though it’s not proper English. It’s exactly how I want to talk about my hair.”

The title of the show borrows a line from DuBois’s seminal “The Souls of Black Folk”: “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” Gates, recounting the darkness of a long history of poverty and racism, exhumes the underlying richness of a culture borne out of a lack of resources in the aftermath of slavery. The free-standing vertical bow-trusses of “Double screen for banking, sex games, and craft concealment,” function as a fully transparent partition, a nod to the psychologically constructed barriers essential to privacy in a one-room house without the luxury of walls. “Reliquary,” a low stone frame covered with fox pelts, is a totem to the power that material status symbols seemingly hold over the poor. “I remember when my aunt got her fur,” Gates says, handling an eyeless pelt. “She called it her Fox: ‘Go get me my Fox.’”

Photo

Theaster GatesCredit
Laure Joliet

Reincarnating historical narratives as painting and sculpture runs in tandem to Gates’s larger-scale practice of gutting and renovating entire abandoned buildings on the South Side of Chicago, repurposing them into archives and community centers. For Gates — who owns the archives of Ebony and Jet magazines, as well as the Edward J. Williams Collection of “negrobilia” and Frankie Knuckles Records — a recurring question is what an archive amounts to. “When Kanye uses seven samples in a song, or John Legend chooses to use a Bill Withers remake, they’re being archivists,” Gates says. “They may not call themselves that, and people might not hear Bill Withers when they hear John Legend, but there comes the possibility of understanding Bill Withers, and that history starts to unfold. I’m interested in how one simply needs to implement history. Perform it. Amplify it. Freak it.”

The one difference, however, between Gates’s urban interventions and his gallery works is that to him, the former is what merits the latter. “I feel like a redemptive moment is the ability to come back to the plastic arts and the studio practices after being involved with the cares of the world for a while,” he says. “Redemptive, like when you go to American Apparel and you spend $100 and they give you a $20 coupon. This show is my cashing in my rebate, some sincere quiet time to contemplate the symbolic things that are on my mind. Maybe the thesis will conclude that to be a poor race is to be a better race, or more interesting one.”